UK’s largest coal producer ‘seeks voluntary liquidation’
A fortnight after the death of Margaret Thatcher, as someone who grew up in a mining community this story, which I suspect signals the final death throes of big scale coal extraction, seems a further poignant reminder of the 80s. Coal defined many rural areas and the pits made them feel urban something we sometimes forget when we equate rural England with “shire” issues. The article tells us:
Britain’s largest producer of coal, UK Coal Operations, is understood to be seeking voluntary liquidation after a devastating fire closed its Daw Mill colliery.
The company announced the closure of Daw Mill in north Warwickshire with the loss of 650 jobs in March after the worst coal-mining fire in 30 years.
The fire at Daw Mill was the latest blow to the industry following Hargreaves Services’s decision last year to mothball the Maltby mine near Rotherham with the loss of 500 jobs.
UK Coal Operations is now seeking voluntary liquidation to avoid being forced into insolvency, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. The company had lost £100m of equipment, £160m of coal and incurred £35m in costs, making further restructuring inevitable, Andrew Mackintosh of UK Coal Operations told the paper.
“We are doing everything we can do to save 2,000 jobs and maximise the returns to creditors,” he said.
Voluntary liquidation would allow a subsidiary to run the firm’s surviving mines, which include some of the UK’s last deep mines – Kellingsley in North Yorkshire and Thoresby in Nottinghamshire – as well as six open-cast mines in north and central England. Creditors would receive an estimated 32p in the pound if the company went into voluntary liquidation, but just 3p in the pound if it was forced into insolvency, according to company estimates seen by the FT.